Neo-Nazi crimes in Germany

A horror from the past

Angst over a ten-year killing spree by a neo-Nazi group

THE murderers' boasts are as chilling as their crimes. From 2000 to 2006 the “National Socialist Underground”, an unknown group with just three core members, apparently killed nine people, eight of them of Turkish origin. In 2007 they shot a policewoman in the head. They claim credit for a 2004 bombing in Cologne that injured 22 people, mostly Turkish. A mocking video celebrates all this but has little to say about the group's goals, promising “deeds, not words”.

The end came on November 4th when Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt staged the last of some 14 bank robberies in Eisenach, in Thuringia. They set their mobile home on fire and apparently shot themselves as the police closed in. Beate Zschäpe, their female comrade, turned herself in after torching the group's house in Zwickau in Saxony. Yet this was no triumph for the law enforcers. The far-right trio were long known to Thuringia's intelligence agency. They disappeared in 1998 on the point of being arrested. Nobody linked them to the “doner murders”, so called because two victims worked in kebab shops.

The authorities “trivialise” right-wing violence, says Hajo Funke, who studies it. Today's violent right is the offspring of unification in 1990, which disrupted the eastern economy and traumatised families. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence service, thinks 25,000 people belong to far-right groups, of whom 9,500 could be violent. Mr Funke says they have committed more than 100 murders since 1990. Yet the authorities worry more about Islamist terrorists, who have done less damage.

The doner killers may force a reassessment. Their decade-long career exposes weaknesses in detection and prevention. Undercover informants can be more useful to the groups they monitor than to their paymasters. The interior ministry now plans a new centre to co-ordinate work on far-right violence by Germany's many police forces and intelligence agencies. The ruling Christian Democratic Union is reconsidering its opposition to a ban on the far-right National Democratic Party, which is said to have links to more extreme groups. The Thuringian gang which made video jokes about its victims was itself no joke.